Comments on: HP Veer 4G Review
PIC Associate Editor Kris Keilhack brings us his take on the new HP Veer 4G…
My initial impression out of the box is that the Veer is impossibly tiny! I was expecting something along the lines of a reduced-size Pre but I was not expecting anything this Lilliputian! The Veer can hide completely under a credit card! It slips safely into a shirt pocket without a moment's hesitation. Without a doubt, this little gizmo is the best execution yet of Palm's "river pebble" theme as first seen at CES 2009 with the original Pre.
Read on for the full HP Veer 4G review.
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RE: Palm 2.0? Research In Motion Tumbles After Another Lousy Quarter
RE: Palm 2.0? Research In Motion Tumbles After Another Lousy Quarter
Also, I still am amazed at how many stores are (still?) selling Playbooks. Or rather, have Playbooks on prominent endcaps for display because I don't think many are being sold! Staples, Office Depot, Offic Max, BB...how so many big retailers could have gotten behind a product so clearly half-baked (arguably the worst high-profile mobile dveice "concept" since the Fooleo) continues to amaze me. And, the Playbook from a company who has never shown much flair for industrial design & zero UI briliance or even an understanding of the consumer market other than saturing every possible carrier with a lot of similar handset designs.
I've long maintained that RIM's success came from being in the right place at the right time and a lot of long-term contracts w/ companies & governments that are utterly dependent on their services. RIM's hardware and OS/UI has always seemed to be running 5 years behind the rest of the industry.
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RE: Palm 2.0? Research In Motion Tumbles After Another Lousy Quarter
come on. why would MSFT buy RIM for billions? they just spent billions of dollars and time creating that turkey WP7. why would they waste more billions buying another turkey like BB? "two turkeys do not make an eagle."
and why would MSFT buy RIM OR Nokia? why would they want to alienate and compete against their entire hardware manufacturer customer base? HTC, Dell, Samsung et al. all of those companies that make WP7 handsets? unless you think that MSFT is abandoning their entire mobile business model.
RIM is toast. NOK is toast. WP7 is toast.
RIM is Palm 2.0. some company will pick them up a few years from now for pennies on the dollar just like HP picked up Palm. but who wants an antiquated proprietary OS? or who wants an antiquated hardware manufacturer? what does RIM bring to the table? it will have to be CHEAP. at least Palm had some interesting fresh new software (WebOS) and a few bright people from Apple. what does RIM offer? sure they have some patents but what are they worth? RIM is staffed by a bunch of 50-something inbred engineers from Southern Ontario. not exactly the cream of the crop from around the world.
RE: Palm 2.0? Research In Motion Tumbles After Another Lousy Quarter
Also, I DO NOT expect MS to buy Nokia or any part of them. That was just a wishful thinking rumor by BGR. They already have a 'strategic investment' partnership with them.
So you'd have Nokia cranking out Windows Phone hardware and RIM supplying whatever they do best. MS can pick up RIM if the price is right, fold the hardware division, and eventually migrate all of the BB-using enterprise & gov customers over to Windows Phone bit by bit.
RIM & Nokia are toast, yes. But MS can never fully be considered out of the game, at least not for the next decade or so.
All we need to do is to pull up the list of Palm suitors circa January 2010, remove HP & RIM from the list (naturally), maybe add a few new names to the mix and you have the list of potential candidates to buy RIM.
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RE: Palm 2.0? Research In Motion Tumbles After Another Lousy Quarter
MSFT has MS Exchange and EAS. and they have WP7. not sure why they need to spend billions and billions to buy RIM. they might be interested in the scraps for cheap though. ie some patents etc. RIM is in a classic death spiral.
RE: Palm 2.0? Research In Motion Tumbles After Another Lousy Quarter
Link?
Pat Horne
RE: Palm 2.0? Research In Motion Tumbles After Another Lousy Quarter
Microsoft would buy RIM because they're stupid. Windows Phone 7 is an abomination and will fail compared to the hordes of superior Android phones on the same hardware. This will take less than a year for Microsoft to realize the platform really is dead. Ballmer will panic and outbid Google for RIM's carcass - probably for a cool $10B when the company has a market value of $6B.
If you ask why Microsoft would do this, think about why they bought Skype. Poor management. Skype is an unprofitable company that can't make money even with enormous economies of scale. Any services Microsoft plans to incorporate Skype into either already has video conferencing (Windows Live, Messenger) or could have bundled the software. They didn't have to buy the company. Same thing happened with Yahoo - they almost bought the company for $40B back in 2008 (which Yahoo eventually turned down as "too low" - ****ing unbelievable), yet now they have an agreement where Yahoo uses Bing for its search. They get the search revenue without the rest of unprofitable Yahoo. This happened in spite of Ballmer trying to buy the company. It happened again with the talks for Microsoft to buy Nokia and culminating in a licensing agreement. All of these companies - Nokia, Yahoo, and Skype have shitty, dying businesses that Microsoft wants to buy because it's a flailing carcass with too much cash from enterprise sales with companies that run Exchange on XP machines.
THAT'S why they'll try to buy RIM. Because they're ****ing stupid.
RE: Palm 2.0? Research In Motion Tumbles After Another Lousy Quarter
Another potentially bad move by MS is they are going to "Windows Phone-ify" & dumb-down Windows 8 with the Metro UI. Just when we got a reasonably fast, stable, and mostly clutter-free OS in Win 7, they're going to start plumping it up again with multiple interfaces/UI modes etc.
Trying to "finger-friendly" mobile UI-ify a desktop OS designed around a keyboard & mouse reminds of of how the HTC HD2 was trying to put a finger-friendly UI atop the WinMob 6.5 pig. Sure it was snazzy when you first booted it up. Then once you delve one or two layers deep you get into the crude native UI. And as far as tablets? Please. Android is a bad enough power and resource hog on a tablet. Anything Windows-related will be an utter disaster on a tablet.
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RE: Palm 2.0? Research In Motion Tumbles After Another Lousy Quarter
i sold my MSFT stock years ago. they stopped innovating too. the only MSFT products i use now are Windows 7 and Office (Excel and Word). and if they screw those up i will switch to Chrome OS and Google Docs.
http://blogmaverick.com/2010/12/10/am-i-living-the-google-lifestyle/
RE: Palm 2.0? Research In Motion Tumbles After Another Lousy Quarter
Suggesting that RIMM is a takeover target certainly sounds like a heroic call, but seriously, do you really think any of the companies on that list would buy RIM? I don't.
Let's walk through them:
HP? They're still trying to integrate Palm, and they've made a major commitment, for better or worse, to WebOS. And CEO Leo Apotheker has declared an intention to build up the company's position in enterprise software. Buy RIM? No way.
Dell? Ha! The company is ratcheting up their spending on the data center, and trying to move away from being strictly a device company. Highly doubtful. Would RIM plus Dell be any more competitive with Apple and Android than RIM alone?
Oracle? Larry Ellison does not want to be in a business as consumer-dependent as this one has become. Not Oracle's style.
Cisco? Get real. The market would run John Chambers out of town. Chambers in the past has flat-out denied any interest in making handsets. The Street wants the company to focus on the core, not to tack on a handset company. No.
Microsoft? A well-worn rumor, but hard to believe Steve Ballmer would buy RIM while trying to make a go of the deal with Nokia. I suppose you could tie them all together – RIM, Nokia and Windows Phone – and pretend that you really had something. But I find such a possibility hard to believe. That would be like thinking you could build a really nice raft by tying three bricks together.
SAP? Now, that's just ridiculous. What does SAP know about hardware, or handsets, or Canada? No. Nein. Not happening.
Canadian pension funds. Well, I have no idea how Canadian pension funds think. Who knows? But do you really want to own the stock on that theory?
Look, all of this talk about someone buying RIM fails to recognize the basic underlying dynamics of the market. Apple and the Android gang are simply wiping out the rest of the players in the handset market. RIM, HP, Nokia, Microsoft…it will not be easy for any of them to stay relevant in the rapidly evolving market for mobile devices. Would you actually want to go out and buy a handset company that is hemorrhaging market share? At today's close, RIM had a market cap of $15 billion; with even a modest premium such a deal could cost a buyer close to $20 billion – and leave them with the task of turning around a plummeting business. I simply don't think that is a likely scenario.
True, even Palm found a buyer – but for $1.2 billion, not $20 billion. Some day, a bottom-fisher could take a flier on RIM. But I don't think we're anywhere near the bottom.
RE: Palm 2.0? Research In Motion Tumbles After Another Lousy Quarter
RE: Palm 2.0? Research In Motion Tumbles After Another Lousy Quarter
Nice bullet list Gekko Reminds me of Time Warner buying AOL about 2-3 years after it's zenith and as the sun was clearly setting. I thot, why do they want that dinosaur. RIM is about the same it seems. Big market share and no future.
Pat Horne
RE: Palm 2.0? Research In Motion Tumbles After Another Lousy Quarter
"how so many big retailers could have gotten behind a product so clearly half-baked (arguably the worst high-profile mobile dveice "concept" since the Fooleo) continues to amaze me."
Because it's Blackberry. Many retailers stock only on brand name, not value, usefulness, or anything else.
@Gekko:
"and why would MSFT buy RIM OR Nokia? why would they want to alienate and compete against their entire hardware manufacturer customer base?"
What manufacturer base? Who is seriously producing WP7 phones? Dell turned in a half-hearted effort, same for Samsung, HTC is doing a little better--but 90% of their effort remains with Android. WP7 is a ghost right now. Nobody cares about it, and it's within a hair's breadth of becoming a DOA operating system on par with WebOS.
Now I'm not saying it's smart. But if they follow the current strategy, WP7 is dead. Period. Buying out another major brand with an established presence like Nokia or RIM would make a certain amount of sense (if you're desperate enough), and might enable Microsoft to stave off death for awhile yet. No guarantees where it goes from there, though. Neither Nokia nor RIM is exactly what Microsoft needs to prosper in the smartphone space. Well, to be honest what they need to prosper is a time machine, so that they can go back and actually implement the things that should have been obvious to them with WM 6.1, like an online app market. But that's a whole other rant.
RE: Palm 2.0? Research In Motion Tumbles After Another Lousy Quarter
RIM Developers Defecting to IPhone, Android
By Devin Banerjee and Hugo Miller - Jun 27, 2011 12:01 AM ET
RE: Palm 2.0? Research In Motion Tumbles After Another Lousy Quarter
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2387558,00.asp?kc=PCRSS03079TX1K0000585
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RE: Palm 2.0? Research In Motion Tumbles After Another Lousy Quarter
1. Go back and shore up its core business and innovate specifically around even more secure settings for enterprise, government and SMB.
this is too little too late. Microsoft EAS security or equivalent is now good enough for most companies. no need anymore for a BB server for security or device management.
2. Exit the consumer business.
this would be suicide. huge loss of revenue, reversal of what little momentum they and economies of scale and a further stagnation and atrophy of their ecosystem. employees are pushing for iPhones, iPads, and Androids in the enterprise because they want them and they have consumer features. people don't want to fumble with two devices. enterprise is finally figuring out that it makes sense to let employees buy/pay for/bring/manage/support/plug in with their own device.
3. Change leadership at the top.
this i can't argue with.
http://www.joyoftech.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/1556.html
4. Consider Being Acquired.
they'd be LUCKY to get acquired at anything near current valuations of $15B.
RE: Palm 2.0? Research In Motion Tumbles After Another Lousy Quarter
5-6 years ago it was a big deal to be issued a BB by your employer. 2-3 years ago it was sort of a mild bummer to be issued a BB. Nowadays everyone is wanting to ditch their archaic BBs as fast as possible, and ideally you can bring your own WP7/Android (sometimes)/iOS device and usually be taken care of. Middle-aged Execs LOVE their iPads!
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RE: Palm 2.0? Research In Motion Tumbles After Another Lousy Quarter
Let's rewind a few years. Picture yourself sitting in an executive briefing at Research In Motion. You'd hear Mike Lazaridis unequivocally state time and time again that BlackBerry smartphones would never have MP3 players or cameras in them because it just does not make sense when the company's primary customers were the government and enterprise. "BlackBerry smartphones will never have cameras because the No. 1 customer of ours is the U.S. government," Mike Lazaridis would say in meetings. "There will never be a BlackBerry with an MP3 player or camera."
The fact is, that RIM didn't only miss the boat in terms of product features and device trends as we now know, but the underpinnings of the company's consumer failure began all the way back in 2005 with bold statements like these, combined with a lack of research and development in numerous key areas.
Mike Lazaridis would say that the most ridiculous idea was to name a phone with a marketing-derived name, like the Motorola RAZR. "BlackBerry will never do that, it will always be a model number," he said to executives. "A BlackBerry with a name is ridiculous."
"Here we are, as young, brazen people, and we're just like, ‘Mike, you're missing out. There's a trend here; it's a social and collaborative scene in certain media circles'," one former executive said, describing the general feeling among other executives at the company. "Now look at what's happened 4 or 5 years later — an MP3 player, camera, name, all done reluctantly."
RE: Palm 2.0? Research In Motion Tumbles After Another Lousy Quarter
"When I would work with our major carriers, I would have to go to Mike's product development team, and ask what are we going to bring to [redacted]," and it was never a cutting edge product, one former executive told me. There wasn't ever a three-year roadmap. Mike was always focused on small, granular features like how to make the speakerphone in a BlackBerry the best speakerphone on the market. Mike would say that people were going to buy a BlackBerry because of the speakerphone… "because they wouldn't need a Polycom anymore."
The three-year roadmap for RIM products focused on refining the technology in phones had already been released, rather than looking at where to add major new componentry or trying to identify or even shape future trends. "One of the main reasons RIM missed the mark with the browser was because
they were always proud of how little data usage a user would use," a former executive said. "There was no three-year plan at RIM." RIM would be proud of the fact that someone would only use 1MB of data in a month in 2005, and as a result, there wasn't ever any extensive R&D done within the browser space. Over time, that misstep affected BlackBerry tremendously as competing devices began to deliver desktop-like Web experiences. "Mike Lazaridis couldn't imagine that consumers would be spending hours watching and streaming video to their devices, he couldn't understand it," the former exec continued. This is why we don't see RIM excelling in spaces like camera technology, or displays — because the company never even attempted to anticipate the smartphone trends we're seeing today. "RIM is a reactionary company."
I remember going to sit with the CMO of one of the largest wireless carriers, and we would deliver features like "increase battery life by 40%" in the next model, and we would get a blank look on the other side of the conference room. The executives would think, ‘so your telling me with this device I am going to sell 40% less car chargers', there was a blank stare. "They want the flavor of the week, and the carrier's loyalty is to their customers and what their customers want. Then try and delivery that."
RE: nice review
RE: nice review
-Centro still feels the most well-balanced of the 3. It also destroys the other two for PIM, quick data input & recall, and one-handed use. No amount of gesture areas or multitouch pinches will ever beat a row of dedicated hard buttons and a clickable d-pad
-Centro still had the best battery life (from what I can recall) & loudest speaker volume
-Pixi has the best feeling keyboard of the 3 by far as well as the best port assortment. It's also the only one with a camera LED flash.
-Veer blows the others away (especially the Centro) in terms of build quality (love that glass screen)
-Size differences aside, Veer definitely has the best screen of the 3 as far as brightness and color saturation.
-Despite being only .03" bigger, the Pixi's screen somehow always "feels" quite a bit bigger than the Veer's
-Veer is the sleekest looking and most natural/comfortable to use in hand initially, but after extended use it almost feels too small and cramped. Pixi is a nice compromise.
My advice? Stick with the Centro until it completely dies.
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RE: nice review
For now I am awaiting the revised Moto Bionic on VZW later this year. It promises to be a dual-core, 4.5" screen superphone with LTE. By the time Android gets to Ice Cream Sandwich it should be approaching a reasonbly decent OS but Google still has a lot of work do for PIM, intuitiveness, and RAM/powermanagement.
The only thing from HP/Palm that I would even remotely consider buying right now is a TouchPad, preferably in a 7" or 8" formfactor but I'll still be extremely curious to test a 10" TP as well. I've been saying since day 1 that WebOS is just crying out to be used on a much larger, higher-res screen.
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RE: nice review
major dealbreakers -
1. shitty small display size.
2. laggy buggy delay to open the browser or the calendar app or contacts app.
3. proprietary connectors and silly contraption adapter dongle.
4. lonely tiny island proprietary ecosystem.
need i go on?
RE: nice review
RE: nice review
Cloud
i love the Cloud. i don't miss local syncing one bit. i don't miss fumbling and fighting and remembering and transporting proprietary sync cables. no more having to plug in and sync a few times every day just to make sure i don't lose any data. all of my data is accessible and backed up and moved and stored and transferred automagically over the air wherever i'm at anywhere in the world - instantly. it's a beautiful thing.
RE: Cloud
To me, it was always such a nail-biting endeavor to initiate a Palm OS hotsync. It just seemed like there was always a risk that something would not work. I often wonder if "the younger generation" can truly appreciate how much better it is now than compared to the risks of a Palm OS HotSync.
As long as we are on the subject, what is your response to the concern that keeping our calendar in the Cloud risks privacy intrusion?
RE: Cloud
i feel relatively safe with Google holding my PIM data from a privacy, security, and safety aspect. i doubt that the serious hackers who have the skill to break into Google's servers are worried about my calendar data. but even if they are - they can have it. for my confidential information i do this -
http://androidforums.com/android-applications/15701-best-password-manager-app-4.html#post2177979
75 bucks on eBay for the Veer !?
WebOS has a strong fan community and I find it refreshing among all the Androids and iPhones in the market.
PLEASE HTC, get on the WebOS bandwagon!
RE: 75 bucks on eBay for the Veer !?
If you want a supercharged phone that reminds me of my Palms, look at the Samsung Note. This device needs to come to the US.
Have a nice day!
HP 41CX->HP 75C->Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->Pilot Pro->IIIe->IIIc->M500->M505->M515->TC->T3->T5->Treo 650P->Treo 700P->Droid>Pre Plus
RE: 75 bucks on eBay for the Veer !?
http://www.samsung.com/global/microsite/galaxynote/note/story.html?type=find
Have a nice day!
HP 41CX->HP 75C->Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->Pilot Pro->IIIe->IIIc->M500->M505->M515->TC->T3->T5->Treo 650P->Treo 700P->Droid>Pre Plus
RE: 75 bucks on eBay for the Veer !?
Wouldn't that make a fine Graffiti platform?
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RE: 75 bucks on eBay for the Veer !?
Thank you for posting the link to your company. I wish you the best! A very minor point: the link on your website for the Palm Centro contains references to the Treo 680.
RE: 75 bucks on eBay for the Veer !?
BTW, just bought a Veer on Amazon. Nice form factor.
RE: 75 bucks on eBay for the Veer !?
http://www.palmunlocker.com/products/unlock-palm-centro
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Pretty Good.
I love the part about the Veer answering questions that nobody is asking. Palm has an illustrious history of that. The magnetic connector that they put engineers and investment into, just about says it all. Pretty slick operation, but completely undesirable for an actual user! Palm staff and leadership was either left over to bless us with that, or Palm had this designed when HP bought in. As idiotic as the Treo 800w.
Now if HP will update the OS to handle all the upcoming direct data sharing / syncing with the touchpad, then I could see a niche for a device like this as a companion.
Pat Horne